Customer Reviews

Windows 95 System Programming Secrets (The Secrets Series)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
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There are very few books that I have gotten this much wealth of information out of. Matt spent a lot of time researching it, reverse engineering windows 95 to see how it works. I would gladly pay 10 times the sales price. I found the in depth coverage of the PE (win95 EXEs) file format much better than anything microsoft has to offer. Also, many people will find the section on how to "inject" DLLs into another process space very useful for all sorts things. The coverage of how exceptions are handled is very good. All of the information in the book is still valid today even though it came out in 95. Anyone writing a debugger, compiler, profiler, or system tool will find this book useful. Let's hope Matt writes another book!

This is one my most valued books, as it really explains how Windows 95 operates. Instead of quoting documentation, which is often lacking or dead wrong, Pietrek holds your hand down to the assembly layer, and derives what's really going on. His discussions on the PE format is unparalleled. Also, it contains a detailed chapter on "spelunking on your own", where he shares some debugging/hacking tricks of deriving such information. I stronly recommend you get this book while it's available!

Simply great! Covers all the secrets of Windows in a superb manner. Reading it was like reading some very intereting novel that I wanted to finish right when I started with the first page. If possible, I would give it infinite stars

This book really uncovered the dark areas of Windows 95. If your work requires you to go deep inside the system, this book will really take your hand right to the point. The best subject is the description of the Win32 protection and how windows do it, Win95 synchronization, Memory management, Win16 mutex,PE ... mostly all system level subjects are covered by this book.

I hadn't realized that Mr Pietrek is something of a legend. I
simply set out to find a decent book that would (un)cover
some of the "secret" things about Win32 programming that were
tripping me up. Not only did I find answers, I found other
things to steer around. It's a good book, it's readable, and
even a bit funny. I'd buy it again, most certainly.

This book is excellent as usual from the top windows reverser Matt Pietrek. By the way, Matt now has his own blog page although he's not writing as much as Raymond Chen. Search Matt Pietrek blog on google will take you to his blog site and if you have a question from the book (which you shouldn't as the book is so very well written :) Call me a Matt Pietrek Fanboi if you want!)

What I like most about Matt's articles and books? 1) Very well thought out explanation; 2) Solid examples that not only demonstrate the ideas but also show you interesting programming tricks.

This is an important book for anyone seriously interested
in how Windows 95 works. The author, who is a friend
of mine, gave me permission to post a short excerpt from
the book to my web/ftp site. The excerpt is called "Dirty
Little Secrets about Windows 95," and is available at:

ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/windows/win95.update/dirty.htm